I blithely type in my password.
But no, this one needs eight letters and some numbers and a symbol or two. That means I can't use the usual - the one I think I will remember.
Never mind, I will try a variation on a theme, or maybe even branch out to something entirely new. No worries really. I will remember it.
How easily I can fool even myself.
For of course, I don't remember it. And so you type in all the variations, adding capitals here and there and numbers in various combinations and you come back blank.
Your attempts may even foil future attempts, even when the password has magically sprung back to mind.
The next time you need the password could be several months hence and, of course, the reason you need it is because some urgent situation has arisen. You could be far from home, far from a computer and certainly far from the handy file you keep intending to keep for just this occasion.
I know privacy about my very private life (aka: the one I share via this column every week) dictates that keeping a password file is not the brightest thing to do. But hey, in the interests of accessing my Boost Juice account, I feel that this is my only chance.
To be honest, the file doesn't contain much at all, given the fact that I can't remember what I should be putting in there. Those elusive passwords may be somewhere in the grey matter, but they are buried deep.
It's strange that I can recall the entire drunken porter speech from Macbeth (yes, I played the drunken porter in the school play in Year 8 - rather dramatically drunkenly too), but I can't remember much of what happened yesterday.
The road leading to the ideal password is a bumpy path and not for the poor of memory.
Am I the only one regularly locked out of her own life, feeling like a criminal or someone slightly unhinged?
If there is no column next week, it may well be that I have been locked out again. Oh well, so it goes.
